Chapter 1 - The Ghost in the Machine
The highway motel room smelled of stale smoke and bleach, a sharp contrast to the lavender and cedarwood of the home Jillian had been locked out of. Outside, freezing rain battered the single pane window. Jillian sat on the edge of the sagging mattress, her UN tactical laptop open on the cheap laminate desk.
In her trembling hands, she held the red wooden train Leo had slipped to her.
“Holiday express trains always need seatbelts,” Leo’s small, terrified voice echoed in her mind.
She twisted the cargo car. The top popped off, revealing a hollowed-out compartment holding a tiny, black micro-USB drive. Mark was arrogant. He thought he was the smartest person in the room, assuming that unplugging the playroom’s nanny-cam severed its memory. He didn't know Jillian had upgraded the internal hardware with a localized, encrypted backup drive before she deployed to the Middle East.
Jillian plugged the drive into her laptop. A decryption program ran for a tense thirty seconds before a folder containing hundreds of video files appeared.
She clicked on a file dated two weeks ago.
The grainy night-vision footage showed Leo’s playroom. The door flew open, and Mark dragged a crying Leo into the room by his forearm.
“Stop crying, or you go in the dark!” Mark snarled, his face twisted in a rage Jillian had never seen. He shoved the five-year-old toward the small utility closet.
“Please, Daddy, no!”
Mark slammed the closet door and locked it. A moment later, Vivian walked into the frame, sipping a glass of wine. She didn’t even flinch at the sound of Leo sobbing behind the door.
“He’s getting louder,” Vivian said casually. “You need to break him before Jillian gets back. If he tells her anything, the entire trust fund goes up in smoke.”
“I know,” Mark snapped. “The lawyers said the estate reverts to Jillian’s sole control on his sixth birthday in February. If I have a restraining order and full custody by January, the Vanguard real estate portfolio defaults to me as his sole guardian.”
May you like
Jillian’s blood turned to ice. They weren't just stealing her son. They were torturing him for a real estate empire. The intelligence operative inside Jillian—the woman who hunted war criminals for the United Nations—took over. The weeping mother vanished, replaced by a cold, calculated predator.
Mark had started a war. Jillian was going to end it.
